Saturday, 10 December 2011

Delegates struggle to craft new climate pact

Optimism at the U.N. talks in Durban, South Africa, gave way to pessimism Saturday, as delegates bickered over how to launch a process that could forge a new global warming pact by 2015.

With time running out, a coalition of small island nations and the European Union floated the option of holding an interim meeting at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in late June to hammer out a meaningful compromise.

The proposal would “launch a work programme to identify and explore options to increase mitigation ambition” by countries so the world could take on steeper cuts in greenhouse gases linked to climate change. The U.N. Secretariat would publish a new technical paper by April that would summarize the current climate science, and then ministers would convene in Rio to craft a deal that could be approved by the end of 2012 in Qatar.

The last time U.N. delegates have taken such an unusual step, known as a “bis,” was a decade ago, after President George W. Bush announced he had no intention of submitting the Kyoto Protocol for Senate ratification. That meeting, in July 2001, ended up salvaging the 1997 climate pact.

“It’ll be a terrible shame if they can’t seize the opportunity to close the deal and launch the roadmap to a new agreement here in Durban,” Jennifer Haverkamp, international climate director at the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, wrote in an e-mail. “But if they can’t, they should keep the momentum moving in the right direction and take another run at it sooner rather than later.”

The world’s three biggest greenhouse gas emitters — China, the United States and India, respectively — have resisted calls throughout the week to commit to a new legally binding climate treaty. China and India are not bound to emissions cuts under the current climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, while the United States did not ratify it. But these nations began to show some flexibility Friday.

Shortly before midnight in Durban, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s foreign minister and the conference’s president, published a new text that called for starting “a process to develop a Protocol or another legal instrument applicable to all Parties under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change” that would finish “no later than 2015.”

It remained unclear what exact legal obligations both industrialized and major developing countries would have under the proposal. But Jennifer Morgan, who directs the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute, wrote in an e-mail that if it was adopted, “this would be an important milestone for the international climate regime.”

The latest proposal came after the nations most imperiled by sea-level rise and other climate problems made it clear they had lost patience with the world’s major carbon emitters.

At one point Friday during a negotiating session, Ian Fry — who represents the low-lying island state of Tuvalu — observed that “we hear expressions of concern” about global warming, “yet some countries say they will not do anything until 2020. We see that as irresponsible.”

Fry suggested that India, Brazil and South Africa could lose the support of these vulnerable nations in their quests to become permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. “For us, this is a security issue,” he said, “and we would need to consider this in the context of the Security Council.”

As the talks dragged on, activists staged a sit-in at the conference center and directed their ire at the United States, chanting phrases including “Climate justice now!” and “U.S. out!” Many of them, including Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace’s international executive director, were thrown out of the conference and had their accreditation badges revoked

Before being removed, Naidoo said, “We are here to stand with the most vulnerable countries, whose basic survival needs have not been met by the men and women in that conference hall. . . . The United States delegation is right now organizing, line by line, the means by which United Nations member states will be eradicated from the map. We will not tolerate this.”

The State Department declined to comment on the protests or the ongoing negotiations.

The talks nearly fell apart in the middle of the day when Nkoana-Mashabane released a vaguely worded document that called on the conference’s 194 parties to “develop a legal framework applicable to all” after 2020 to address climate change.

That sparked resistance from delegates such as Selwin Hart, the lead finance negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States.

“We had to come up with something significantly more ambitious,” Hart said, adding that the delegates remained at the table because “there is an honest commitment that this is the place where important decisions on climate change should be made.”

But, Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser at the D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center, questioned in an e-mail whether the “dysfunctional” process that came out of the United Nations should dictate American climate policy.

“The lesson is simple — climate leadership can and must spring from U.S. economic and security interests, not as a U.N. byproduct,” Bledsoe wrote.

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UNFCCC COP 19

The 19th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is held in Warsaw, Poland from 11 to 22 November.

All 14 Pacific island countries are represented at these climate negotiations.

About AOSIS

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change. It functions primarily as an ad hoc lobby and negotiating voice for small island developing States (SIDS) within the United Nations system.

AOSIS has a membership of 44 States and observers, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea. Thirty-seven are members of the United Nations, close to 28 percent of developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN’s total membership. Together, SIDS communities constitute some five percent of the global population.

Member States of AOSIS work together primarily through their New York diplomatic Missions to the United Nations. AOSIS functions on the basis of consultation and consensus. Major policy decisions are taken at ambassadorial-level plenary sessions. The Alliance does not have a formal charter. There is no regular budget, nor a secretariat. With the Permanent Representative of Saint Lucia as its current chairman, AOSIS operates, as it did under previous chairmanships, out of the chairman’s Mission to the United Nations.